Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

Articles from Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring

I. INTRODUCTION By the year 1994--his twenty-fourth on the Supreme Court--Justice Harry Blackmun was a liberal icon, not only for his authorship and defense of Roe v. Wade, (1) but also because of his forceful dissents from many of the Rehnquist...

All would agree that the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States collectively exercise enormous power. Only slightly less obvious is the fact that, given the frequency of five-to-four decisions, especially in the most important and controversial...

On January 27, 2010, in his State of the Union address, President Obama declared: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the
Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open
the floodgates for special interests--including...

It is important to recall what motivated Members of this Court at the genesis of our modern capital punishment case law. Furman v. Georgia was decided in an atmosphere suffused with concern about race bias in the administration of the death penalty--particularly...

I. INTRODUCTION Federal appellate practice is not what is used to be. In the 1970s, oral argument was routinely granted and it was generously sized at thirty minutes per side. After a period of dramatic shrinkage in both frequency and length in...

Justice Marshall's opinion in Furman v. Georgia memorably characterizes the abolition of capital punishment as "a major milestone in the long road up from barbarism." (1) For abolitionists today, it is surprising to recall that this phrase was not...

I. INTRODUCTION Shortly after receiving my law license at the age of twenty-four, I served as co-counsel on the initial appeal of Carl Buntion, who had been sentenced to death for the 1990 capital murder of a Houston police officer. In 1995, the...